Written on the Subway Walls
by lurknomoar
Summary: Nick Fury, the best guerilla artist in New York city, hires six very different kids to create the greatest street art the world has ever seen. Some of them do it for the money, some for the fame, one of them is just trying to find his brother, but all of them find more than they expected, including old demons, neo-nazi gangs, and art that is too true to be good.
1. Nick Fury's Story

Author's Note: Can you still call it a notfic if it is longer than 10K? I think not, that's why I decided to post this series of snippets about the avengers as graffiti artists.

Nick Fury is the leader of a street art /guerrilla art initiative, known as the SHIELD Project. (Streets and 'Hoods Imagining an Electric Life's Design) He had a difficult childhood and youth, he was a gang member, and on the borderline of getting involved in organised crime. Once, he got in a fight, and was beaten almost to death, but in retrospect, he's glad that it happened. Had he won the fight, he would have gone to prison, and the other man would be dead. Instead, he was hospitalised, and lost one eye. The local charity named Marvel Institute helped him get back on his feet. Eventually, he became an art teacher in a Brooklyn high school. He enjoys his job, and despite his strictness, all the students think he is cool. He suspects it's because of the eyepatch.

But that's only his dayjob. He runs the SHIELD Project, because he loves street art, and because he thinks it can be a way of giving back to the community. He already did things like guerrilla planting, or placing stickers with messages everywhere, but now he wants to do something more monumental. He has experience with tagging from his youth, and he sets out to recruit the six best young graffiti artists from Brooklyn. As their headquarters, he chooses a huge empty warehouse somewhere in the fictional outskirts of Brooklyn, knowing that they will eventually cover its insides in graffiti.

Maria Hill is an art student at NYU, and Nick Fury's right hand. Her primary duty is location scouting, she roams New York in her ancient little blue Honda. Her driving is sure, but fast enough to give even Fury a heart attack. Her own projects are sculptures, mostly with mechanical-military themes, if she got the funding, she could build them in monumental sizes like she wants to, not the miniatures she is forced to do now.

Phil Coulson is also an art student at NYU. He is also central to the SHIELD project, taking care of the financial aspects, acquiring materials, and doing his best to cover everyone's asses legally should they get caught. He designs cards, trying to convince his professors that applied art isn't inherently low-brow. He is in a passionate long-distance relationship with a cellist who lives in Portland. The name of and gender of the cellist is unknown to everyone but him.


	2. Backgrounds, Backstories and Brooklyn

Author's note: This is mostly background info about the universe this story takes place in.

This story takes place in Brooklyn, but in a fictional neighbourhood. (It's easier to admit you made something up than to get something wrong about something real.) The area is quite poor, but peaceful: communal spirit is high, and people help each other. The area is full of different generations of immigrants – South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, as well as newly arrived migrant workers from Poland, from Hungary.

The most important feature of the district is the Marvel Institute. The story goes that a Holocaust survivor named Velma Lazarevitch stumbled into New York in the winter of '46, penniless, pneumonic, only seventeen and all alone in the world. She was taken in by an almost-broke waiter known as Martin White, who gave her room and board, nursed her through her illness and gave her work until she could support herself by teaching German. He made her realise that people were, or at least could be, good. Eventually they fell in love, but they couldn't get married, because Martin was black. So they lived together. Velma couldn't have children because of the things she went through, so they had some time left over to try and help their neighbours. They started a grassroots scheme from their own house, with no funding, and no clear goal apart from making it easier for their community to survive. Velma had experience with running a business from her parents, and Martin had extraordinary charisma, and they had an enthusiasm that most people found very hard to resist. In twenty years, they were running the Marvel Institute from its own building, with paid staff, but the goal was the same - find solution for short-scale problems, and offer long-term hope. They give micro-loans, petition local authorities, find educational grants and organise charity collections when they can't fix something out of hand. When our story takes place, Marvel Institute is the centre of the neighbourhood, and people use it both to get help, and just as a place to hang out.

The NeoNazi gang known as Hydra is the main antagonist in the story. They wear black, shave their heads, and their symbol is a snake around a swastika. They have local chapters that are nothing more than frustrated white boys causing havoc, going as far as vandalism and getting into fights, but their central leadership is as dangerous as it is secretive. Nobody knows the names or identities of the inner circle that gives orders to the local chapters, but their supreme leader is known as the 'Red Skull'. (This is how they were named Hydra: if the police shuts down some members, or a local branch, two will spring up in its place.) During the course of our story, they gain members and importance in the neighbourhood of the Marvel Institute, and start a campaign that is mostly composed of threatening vandalism, slowly escalating into property damage and muggings.


	3. Steve's Story

Steve Rogers is 17 years old. He was a scrawny, sickly kid for most of his life, the favourite victim of every local bully, until he had a sudden growth spurt on the summer of his 15th birthday. He started playing football, discovered that he was actually good at it, and ended up the captain of the high school football team, the Howlers. His new status earned him the nickname 'Cap' and made him the darling of the school, but he never forgot his years at the bottom of the foodchain, making him both more compassionate and definitely more awkward.

Steve isn't a native of Brooklyn: he comes from a small town named Liberty, Kentucky. He had to move to Brooklyn, because his mother lost her job, and found the first reliable offer over there. His mother raised him alone, and they always had financial difficulties, living just a step above desperate poverty. Due to his upbringing in small-town America, his views about the world are far more old-fashioned than those of the other members of the group, and getting to know New York life, he changes some of his beliefs. He is a kind and compassionate person, and he realises that the things he has been taught about immigration, gay rights, or even women may not be entirely correct. Still, he remains a Christian and a patriot – only a more informed one.

His best friend is Bucky, a fellow football player and the playboy of the school. Bucky often mocks him, because he has less success with girls: Steve has never even kissed anyone. He has a huge crush on Peggy, a snarky brunette aiming to be valedictorian. Steve has finally worked up the courage to talk to her when they did a project on WW2 history together, and surprisingly, she actually seemed to like him. At least, she promised to dance with him at the next school disco – at which point he had to leave for Brooklyn, asking for a rain check on the dance. He is sorry to leave her, and probably even sorrier about leaving Bucky – Bucky just had a terrible football accident, leaving him hospitalised for weeks, and Steve wanted to be there to help him through recovery.

Steve has a talent for drawing. Before he started football, his main hobby was drawing: sketching people and inventing dream-landscapes. Even though he enjoys drawing a lot, and has enough talent to make a career of it, he always thought of it as a slightly strange personal interest, definitely nothing to be proud of. But all that changes, once he is recruited by SHIELD.


	4. Tony's Story

Tony Stark, age 18, is the only child of rich, if somewhat distant entrepreneurs. They are not actually millionaires, but definitely well off enough that they can afford a large Brooklyn brownstone, and their son had never lacked for anything he wanted. Of course, they had to travel a lot, creating and upholding StarkTech, and so Tony was mostly raised by nannies and other paid help. It doesn't help that the most important in the line of his surrogate parents, Obadiah Stane, had tried to run away with the patents for the latest StarkTech designs.

Tony had always been very intelligent, and he had always been a problem child. His father gave up trying to control him around age 14. Afterwards, Tony drank far too much, had too many one night stands to count, and far worse than that, he was an incurable show-off. The only person who had some measure of control over him was Rhodey, his much more level-minded best friend. Rhodey always tried to steer him away from self-destruction and towards the other thing Tony was good at – inventing and building things. His other friend was Pepper, an astoundingly level-headed girl in the year above his, who was just as unwilling to put up with his shit as Rhodey.

After a particularly terrible argument with his father, which was followed by both his parents moving out for a half a year, Tony went spectacularly off the rails, even more so than usual. Among other things, he taunted motorcycle gangs into racing him, and on one occasion, suffered a near-fatal accident. Due to massive chest trauma, he had to have heart surgery. He spent months recovering in a hospital, and in the end had to miss an entire school year. This experience left Tony changed. Outwardly he is more collected and responsible, applying himself to new projects, such as designing and marketing the 'Jarvis' app, a diary/calendar system with never-before-seen efficiency and politeness. Internally, he is panicked. He keeps missing his medical check-ups, because he doesn't want to face the possibility that the surgery didn't work and he is dying, he thinks it's all his fault for getting into the race, but he doesn't dare talk about this with his friends, and he obsessively hides his surgery scar.

As a way to deal with his fear and anger, he built a new, better motorcycle out of scratch, and painted it red and gold. He started roaming the city at night, and making street art. He is better at design than at figure drawing, so he mostly paints slogans and quotes on walls: his favourite is 'have you lost your mind, can you see or are you blind?'. He can weld his own metal stencils, and is innovative about the technical side of street art.

Tony is bi, and at different times in his life, he dated both Rhodey and Pepper. They were together with Rhodey when they were about fourteen, for a few months after they figured out that having sex with each other was an option, and before they realised that just because it was an option, they didn't necessarily have to do it. Tony dated Pepper for a while after his accident, but they both knew that Tony was incapable of talking about his fears, and this eventually drove them apart. While cooperating on the Jarvis project, Rhodey and Pepper got to know each other, bonded over their long-suffering, annoyed love for Tony, and eventually started dating. Tony gave them his blessing, and is genuinely glad that they are together – he is more worried about the fact that they are planning to go to different colleges. Pepper wants to study business at NYU, Rhodey applied to West Point, and Tony has no idea. They keep telling him to apply to MIT, but he isn't sure he will get in, or even that he wants to go. This is when he is recruited by SHIELD, to handle the technical aspect of their street art project, as well as do some of the groundwork.


	5. Bruce's Story

Bruce Banner grew up in a respectable family, went to a respectable school, chose a respectable career – nothing special, really. He always lived up to expectations, perfectly and without complaining, repressing anything that may not fit into the picture he made of himself, the picture others made of him, as the soft-spoken, hardworking med student. He repressed his anger at the stupidity of his professors, the cruelty of the medical system he was going to be working in, the screaming pain over not going to be able to save everyone. He didn't even let himself think about it. But inside, he gathered up a ball of anger, hate and resentment that threatened to explode.

He started to do graffiti, because it was the only way he could prevent the stress from tearing him apart. He mixed his own paints, something he enjoyed doing, as he was a brilliant chemist. Eventually he settled on painting bold abstract formations, half-organic half-geometrical, on walls of buildings, all of it in vivid shades of green. At first, his work was genuinely beautiful and creative. But as time went on, painting started to become an alternative state of consciousness for him, sort of a trip, one in which he didn't even know where he was, or who he was, all he knew was bright green rage. In these rages, he did more than paint – he destroyed everything he could lay his hands on, with a strength that far exceeded everything his scholar's body was capable of. This escalated until the third year of med school, when one day he found himself painting on the window of a grocery store, then smashing it, going in, and laying waste to everything moveable in a fit of undirected blind rage. The neighbours came to see what was going on, and Bruce sobered up to the realisation that he just trashed the shop (the livelihood) of an innocent man for absolutely no reason. While running away, he saw that he was in Harlem - and who the hell goes to Harlem to smash up shops? He didn't want to be that person, but he wasn't sure who he was anymore. After sending all his savings to the shop owner's family, he destroyed all his graffiti equipment, he dropped out of med school and cut ties with his family, fearing that his uncontrollable temper may come to hurt people again.

Before the breakdown, he had one long-term relationship, to Betty Ross, a classmate. He was never sure if he broke up with her because he was afraid he would hurt her, or because, despite really liking her as a friend, he has never been genuinely attracted to her.

He lived as a recluse in a run-down apartment for more than a year, making some sort of living repairing electronic devices. He had no furniture other than a mattress, after having broken everything, again, in a fit of despair. He avoided people as much as he could, speaking with an awkward, no-eye-contact formality, trying to keep them away from him – he was only somewhat more comfortable around children, as he instinctively knew that he would never, ever hurt a child. The only luxury he allowed himself was visiting the New York Public Library to read journals on the medical field that interested him most: advances in radiation therapy. For some of this time, he was borderline suicidal, but he never went through with it, the part of him clinging to life stronger than his conscious mind.

Around this time, he was 24 years old, but with the bitterness of an octogenarian. And this is when project SHIELD approached him. He agreed to work with the group, but only after Nick Fury promised that he himself wouldn't have to paint – he would only be there to mix paint for the others, to think up new and striking colours for their compositions.


	6. The Story of Thor and Loki

Thor and Loki are not actually the characters from Norse mythology – they are the entirely human brothers Thomas and Daniel Carter, aged 18 and 16 respectively, who took these names as a new identity.

Thomas Carter was two when his father, a policeman, was shot. He survived, but lost an eye, and suffered occasional debilitating migraines. Thomas lived happily with his father, mother and little brother until six years later, when his father suffered some sort of relapse, and fell into a coma. This was a difficult time, with their father effectively gone, and their mother having to work extra shifts as a nurse to pay for the hospital bills. They got a lot of support from their father's former partner, Mr H. Apart from being a brilliant policeman (rumour said he could hear and see everything in a ten mile radius), Mr H was a Norse mythology buff, and told little Tommy and Danny stories to comfort and encourage them. The boys started to play make-believe with the myths – their father was obviously Odin All-Father because of the eyepatch, making their mother Freya. Tommy called dibs on Thor Odinsson, the boisterous god of thunder. This would have made Danny Baldur Odinsson, the beloved god of the sun, but he refused. Already at age six, Danny didn't want to be a good guy who dies, he wanted to be the guy that wins – this is how he became Loki, god of tricks and lies, even though in the original myths, Loki is the brother of Odin, not Thor. When they took these names, they stopped ever cutting their hair – long hair was one of the things tying them to the myth, and to each other. This world they created was their refuge in hard times, the world in which they weren't scared children but powerful gods having adventures. Thor and Loki protected, trusted and loved each other; they were ready to take the world on for each other.

Even after their father got better, they kept their identities as Thor and Loki. Both of them were very good at drawing, and they were quite reckless, Thor especially. This is how they got into illegal street art, when Thor was 14 and Loki 12. Loki usually did more of the sketching, and Thor more of the actual quick painting. They painted epic Norse-themed tableaux, heavy on lightning, snakes and wolves, and they became known as just 'the Brothers'. They often worked together with a crew named Sif3, which, despite the name, meant four people: Sif and her three boys. They were just as addicted to taking stupid risks as Thor was, and they often got into fights – Loki, on the other hand, preferred outwitting their rivals. He was often mocked for this, and while it was mostly affectionate, he found it grating.

Everything changed when Loki, aged 15, took a stupid dare and went rifling through the papers his father kept in a safe. They contained the details on the investigations into the criminal activities of a man named Laufey, his extended network of enforcers, his habit of punishing anyone who displeased him by freezing them alive, and his eventual death resisting arrest. This was the police raid that cost their father his eye. The report also described the things left in Laufey's lair, including five girls, three of them underage, kept there for his own amusement. One of them had a baby only a few weeks old – Laufey's son. The girl was traumatised, she needed care and didn't want to keep the baby. After his miraculous recovery from being shot, Officer Carter took the child home to his wife, and officially adopted him under the name Daniel Carter.

Loki didn't take this revelation well. He was furious at his adopted father for never telling him about his origins. He was furious at Laufey, and at being related to such a monster. But most of all, he was furious at himself for not having figured it out sooner, after all he has always been different from the rest of his family, and not only in hair colour. He started wondering, whether this was the reason that Thor was always better than him in everything they did, if this was why their parents seemed to prefer Thor. Why would they even pretend to love someone descended from the monster, who caused so much suffering, who caused his father's migraines and coma? Loki couldn't bear to stay in the family home any longer, and ran away without a word. As a result, Thor had a terrible argument with his parents, because he blamed his father for not telling them about the adoption and his father blamed him for letting Loki look at the report. In the end, Thor ended up running away too, dropping off the grid to try to find his brother.

Once, he managed to catch up with his brother with the help of the Sif3, and tried to talk, or failing that, beat some sense into him. However, Loki outsmarted them, tricking the Sif3 into being caught red-handed by the police and being given a few months of jail for vandalism – in effect, they had to cease operations. Before leaving, he looked Thor in the eye, and said, clearly and coldly: 'You are not my brother.'

Since then, Thor has been trying to find Loki again, while avoiding being found by his father or the police. He works odd jobs around Brooklyn, and sleeping on couches if he can get them, and benches if he can't. For the past few months, he's been living with two young women, astrophysics students from NYU, who took pity on him and let him sleep in their flat in exchange for doing some housework. (They are insanely busy with research, and Thor is a pretty good cook.) Thor has a mutual we-may-like-each-other thing going on with one of the students, Jane, but he still spends his nights painting lightnings and hammers everywhere he can, hoping to catch Loki's attention. This is when he is approached by SHIELD to contribute his quick execution of grand pictures to the group's talents.


	7. The Story of Clint and Nat

Clint grew up in a travelling circus, performing from an age that was almost certainly illegal. In his mid-teens, fed up with the infighting and corruption in his adoptive home, he became one of the few children to run away _from _the circus as opposed to_ with _it. He ended up in Brooklyn, where the Marvel Institute more-or-less kept him off the street, and allowed him to become an emancipated minor to prevent him from going into state care. He never had a formal education, but while working, he took some evening classes at the Institute.

Nat was pretty much born into the lowest ranks of the Russian mafia. She needed to make herself useful – those who weren't useful ended up as someone's bitch, or dead. She learned not to wear her heart on her sleeve, and to never show any weakness. By her early teens, she worked for the family as a thief and courier, because she was good at it, and because no one would suspect such an adorable little girl. She developed the ability to scale any wall, and get into or above any building, she could reach places that seemed humanly impossible, and soon she was put in charge of placing graffiti on buildings and overpasses as a this-is-our-turf-leave-or-get-knifed sign.

Clint started climbing buildings, because heights and danger were what he missed most from his circus days. Eventually he started tagging the places he managed to reach, with a simple bow-and-arrow motif. He soon realised that most points he thought unreachable were marked with a stylised spider, the personal watermark of the legendary tagger others in the community dubbed 'Black Widow'. Clint's speciality was finding the spots on an extremely high building that would be easiest to see from ground level, earning him the moniker 'Hawkeye'. The rivalry of the two taggers was intense, despite never having seen each other – they grew bolder and bolder, taking greater and greater risks to best the other, an escalation no other could follow, only gape at. On of those staring and gaping was an art student, Phil Coulson, who doggedly researched until he found Hawkeye's real identity, and referred him to Nick Fury's project SHIELD. Clint got paid work doing what he really enjoyed – getting elements of guerrilla art (anything from stickers to moss to clothes hangers) to unlikely places without being seen.

He only met Nat around the time they were both 17, because there was a huge police crackdown on the Russian mafia, and with most of the family behind bars, she was hunted. Clint found a freshly painted spider somewhere he himself wanted to tag, and vexed that once again the Black Widow has been faster, he tried to pursue. He found Nat on the flat top of a high rise. He expected Black Widow to be an adult, possibly male, and definitely professional. Instead he saw a scrawny redheaded girl around his own age, surrounded by police, armed with a single knife against six guns, baring her teeth and apparently prepared to fight her way out, or die trying. And then, Clint did something very stupid. He threw a spray paint can at the head of one of the cops, yelled 'you'll never catch the Widow' and started running. He was tackled and handcuffed in less than a minute, but in the ensuing chaos, the girl managed to escape. It took Fury a lot of manipulation and some perjury to get Clint released on bail, but he got away with only a fee.

A few weeks later, Nat showed up in the sublet room he lived in, unannounced in the middle of the night. She told him he shouldn't have done what he did, as she had a good chance of talking her way out of there, after all she got by this far, pretending to be harmless and lost. He said he didn't know that, and either way he didn't want her to die. Then, still half asleep, Clint told her to help herself to some biscuits he had in the cupboard, and dragged himself out of bed in his boxers to make some coffee. From then on, they were close friends. They don't always live together, as Nat can't bear to stay in one place, but eventually Clint's half-flat becomes the closest thing to a home she has. They are friends, allies, and co-workers, they are the most important person in one another's life. It's difficult to say whether or not they are lovers – on one hand, sometimes they make out, or even have sex, on the other hand anything that orderly and institution-like is anathema to both of them. Both of them have darkness in their past, and Clint reacts by putting on the persona of the friendly braggart, while Nat is very reserved, and when she deigns to open her mouths, her sarcasm cuts to the bone. She speaks with a discernable Russian accent – she can lose it if she wants to, but she keeps it as the last thing she carries with her from her childhood. She sometimes tells him details about his past – small glimpses, never the whole story, but still more than she ever told anyone.

Once she learned of the opportunity, Nat too went back to school – not for the degree, and not regularly, only to learn languages and to catch up on contemporary politics more easily. Eventually she started working for the SHIELD Project too, showing it the same fierce loyalty she shows Clint. Her and Clint's job is to figure out how to get art, or other street artist to high, or otherwise hard-to-reach locations. When the story takes place, Clint is 20 years old, Nat isn't sure of her birthdate but she can't be much younger, and they are at the top of their game.


	8. Our Plot Starts (for Real)

Author's Note: This is where the plot is actually going to kick in.

Steve hates living in New York, he really does. He's homesick, he misses Bucky, Peggy and his old football team, and he tries to keep in e-mail contact via the computers in the school library. He can't connect with the other students in the high school and he has trouble following the classes as well. The only one he enjoys is Art – Mr Fury always gives interesting assignments.

One day, Mr Fury pulls him aside after class, and asks him if he wants to do extracurriculars, an art club of sorts. Steve of course immediately agrees, in the hope of finding some friends in his new home. He is left alone in Fury's office with a bunch of art supplies, with the instructions to cover one of the blank walls. One hour later, two university-level art students walk in, introducing themselves as Maria and Phil, and then promptly falling speechless, seeing the city-dreamscape Steve created on the wall. It is like something out of old sci-fi utopias, all bright colours and straight lines. Phil starts complimenting Steve to a genuinely uncomfortable degree, who is slightly freaked out, until Maria points out that Phil is in a committed relationship with a cellist, and is merely overenthusiastic about art. The art students decide that Steve passed the test, and walk him to Maria's little old blue Honda. They drive the bewildered Steve to a warehouse on the broken-down outskirts of Brooklyn, and on the way explain about the alternative art initiative that is SHIELD.

Entering the warehouse, Steve sees one uninterrupted huge space, and in that space the others: the black-haired kid welding something with goggles on, the bespectacled guy in a purple shirt, trying to caution him, the tall guy with the long blond hair and even longer red scarf putting the finishing touches on a two-story high painting of a wolf, as well as the two people hanging from the ceiling on ropes. In the middle of the warehouse stands Mr Fury, and welcomes Steve with a smile. He explains Steve that with his drawing skills, he could help the team design new street art. At first, Steve is against the idea of graffiti, after all, he's been taught to see it as thuggish vandalism. Fury takes out a few albums from his suitcase, and explains him about street art: the paintings on the Berlin Wall, on the Israeli West Bank Barrier, and artists like Banksy, or Aya Tarek. Street art has the potential to be truly free art, art that touches people and makes a difference. Steve agrees to join the team, and is introduced to each one of them.


	9. There is Work and Vodka

In the next few weeks, Steve starts working with the team on their first project: painting on boarded-up windows of houses to make them look like they are actually open. Inside, a dog is trying to steal ham out of a sandwich, or a couple is kissing, or the TV is on in an empty room. Of course, they have to go on with their daily lives, so they meet most afternoons in the warehouse, and go tagging one or two weeknights. Steve makes sketches, and the team, especially Nat and Clint, teach him about graffiti. Steve gets on best with the two of them, because Thor's paganism confuses him, and he isn't sure he knows how to deal with Tony's crudeness and promiscuity and loudness. Tony in turn sees Steve as a rival, and they eventually have a loud argument in which Steve questions the point of complicated technology without the art that gives it purpose, and Tony tells Steve he only attacks technology because he will never have any idea how it works. Steve hardly gets to talk to Bruce, because he is shy and bitingly sarcastic in turns, with everyone except for Tony. Bruce and Tony work on more efficient stencilling and spraying mechanisms, often devolving into long geeky technobabble-y conversations totally unintelligible to anyone else.

Once the team's street art starts showing up in the neighbourhood, it becomes obvious that they are not the only group moving there. Individual taggers and street artists seem to have been driven out by something, and that something is Hydra. Hydra is a NeoNazi organisation, skinheads who leave their sign, a snake around a swastika, all over the place as a warning that they will mug and attack unwary people. Fury realises that they are on Hydra turf, and warns the group not to get into a rivalry with them, and especially not to engage them personally.

Once the team finds out that Steve has never been drunk before, they decide to have a party. Tony brings some whiskey, but Nat smirks, calls him an amateur, and pulls an unmarked plastic bottle out from her backpack, full of a clear liquid. "Real vodka, not your store-bought crap, bootlegged straight from Volgograd." They start drinking – Tony and Thor are practised drinkers, Bruce excuses himself after one shot, with embarrassed mumbling about medical issues, Nat seems utterly unaffected after the sixth shot, but Clint is so out of it that she decides to take him home. Thor leaves with them. Steve appears to have a decent tolerance of alcohol, but he can definitely feel its effects. Tony and Steve end up having a drunk, mellowed-out conversation, sprawled out on the worn, battered sofa in the corner of the warehouse. Tony tells Steve what he can never talk about sober, about his accident, his heart surgery, his scar and his fears. He tells Steve that he keeps missing his doctor's appointments, because that would mean being sure whether the surgery worked or not, whether he has one year to look forward to or fifty. Steve hums and nods, he can't really offer comfort, but he feels it's weird that Tony revealed something if he didn't, so he tells Tony his not-quite-shameful secret, that he is a virgin. Tony is surprised, disbelieving. "I've never even kissed anyone." Adds Steve. "That's easy to fix" murmurs Tony, and gives him a brief kiss on the mouth. Then he suddenly feels very sober, and starts explaining. "Before you freak out, I want to make sure that you know that this doesn't make you gay. Because you might think that. And then you'd be freaked." Steve thinks, frowning – the kiss wasn't bad, it wasn't that good either, and he is too sleepy to freak out. "I don't think it made me anything. But thank you, I guess." Terribly drunk, they fall asleep on the sofa. Neither of them knows that Bruce stayed in the warehouse, just in case he is needed as a designated driver, and saw everything – but didn't hear it. He is more resigned than jealous – after all, he could have guessed that Tony would prefer someone with the body of a quarterback and without terrible baggage.

Early next morning, the three of them are woken up by Thor, shouting at them to come see what he found. What Thor found is a snake around a swastika, but this time much more elaborate than the usual Hydra logo – and Thor knows that only one person could have painted it, because this is Loki's own Jörmungard design. There is no other explanation – Loki has joined Hydra.


	10. Bruce gets a Little Angry

The team start a new project based on Steve's sketches of people – they paint larger-than-life portraits of people (with their permission of course) and add a few fantastic details, the old grocery shop owner becomes an angel and the little girl playing in the street is turned into an astronaut. They love the art part of it, but it is clear now that in the graffiti department, they are Hydra's number one rival. Hydra starts doing worse and worse – vandalism, smashing in windows and breaking into shops. It pains Thor to know his estranged little brother is part of something like that, but he hasn't figured out how to find and confront him, how to bring him home.

Once the team is walking home in the early morning, having finished a new picture, when they see that one of their images, the black little girl as an astronaut, has been painted over with a snake-and-swastika. They have painted it on a wooden fence around an empty lot, in an environment that was grey and depressing, and it brought innocent beauty into that drab greyness. Bruce gets angry. He tries to take the fence down, but the planks hold fast, and the others tell him to calm down, and he utterly loses it. He screams, throwing himself against the fence then grabbing the loosened plank and tearing it out, and continuing to pull and tear the entire fence apart. When Nat tries to get him to stop, he throws a plank at her and continues, tearing and stomping and hitting and breaking with a strength that is beyond the strength of his slim body. When Steve tried to stop him, he Bruce throws a punch that knocks him off his feet, and the surprise hurts more than the actual fall. It takes Thor's bulk and unflinching patience to stop Bruce from beating himself into pieces on that fence, and even he only manages it by sitting on him, and holding him down with sheer weight. Bruce comes to himself, his glasses lost, his vision blurred with tears of anger, his hands bruised and bleeding, aching and ashamed and confused. Without looking up, he tells the others that this sometimes just happens to him, and this is why he can't do street art anymore. He is genuinely surprised when they don't shun him in fear, disgust or ridicule – instead Thor helps him up, Steve gives him his jacket, Nat offers him a bottle of water, Clint scouts ahead to see if anyone heard them, and Tony, Tony slings and arm around his shoulder, and makes a stupid joke about how Bruce would make a great demolition worker. Even though he is aching to his bones, Bruce feels better since he has for a long, long time.


	11. People Kneel for Different Reasons

Hydra moves beyond graffiti – they are in the news. A café was robbed in the Brooklyn district where our story takes place – it was a group of Hydra members, identical with their shaved heads and leather jackets. But their leader is different - a tall young man with long black hair, who calmly directed the entire operation – instead of robbing the till only, he ordered everyone present to kneel with their hands behind their heads, and took their valuables one by one. The security footage is grainy, but the witnesses and victims described him as 'smooth-voiced' and 'his eyes, his eyes were so cold'. Thor is, of course, distraught – Loki wasn't just going along with criminal activity, he was leading it. He wants to confront Loki, but has no means of finding him.

Steve accidentally lets Bruce know about Tony's insecurities about his heart surgery and his chances of survival. When Bruce tries to talk to him about it, and tries to make him go for his medical check-up to know what his chances _are_, Tony lashes out, feeling betrayed both by Steve and Bruce – after all, he didn't want anyone to know about his weakness. The next afternoon Bruce shows up, and tells Tony that he managed to get an appointment with a brilliant, if rather strange heart specialist, using his old med school contacts and some harmless lies. They go to the appointment on Tony's homemade red-and-gold bike, Bruce holding on tight, closing his eyes, ashamed that he enjoys it as much as he does. Tony doesn't mind, he is glad someone accompanies him, because he would never ask for company, but he could never go alone. For all his antipathy for the medical establishment, Tony hits it off instantly with Dr Yinsen, and the doctor reassures him that his chances are good – of course he will always be at risk, and he can expect chest pains when he is older, but all in all, he should have a long life.

Tony rides the bike with Bruce clinging behind him, takes him home. In the doorway, he trips over his words, it has been years since he tried to thank someone honestly so he is very much out of practise. Then he gives up, and kisses the living daylights out of Bruce, pushing him back against the door. Bruce pushes him back, tells him this is a very sleazy way to show gratitude. But Tony isn't just grateful – he really likes Bruce because he is genuinely brilliant and able to stay one step ahead of him when they talk science and he is funny in a dry, understated way and his ideas about colour-changing biodegradable paint are genius, pure genius, and his hair is all floppy, and he is just, so, so… as he is talking, Tony realises that he means it, that he likes Bruce to a rather frightening extent, and judging from Bruce's grin combined with that wide-eyed look, Bruce definitely likes him back just as much. They stumble into the almost-empty apartment, only books and a futon, and Bruce shrugs towards the squalor as if to indicate 'this is my life'. Tony is suddenly certain that people usually don't get to see this, so he forces himself to take his T-shirt off, to reveal his surgery scar. When Bruce gently presses his lips to the end of the white line over his collarbone, Bruce can't help blurting out, against the tenderness and desire rising in him 'Oh god, please don't try to fix me.' Bruce rises to eye level, and after a moment of contemplative silence, says 'I won't fix you if you don't fix me.' Tony says 'deal', and then they tumble onto the futon, touching, kissing, grabbing, being enough for each other despite their brokenness, or maybe being perfect for each other just because they are broken.

In the early hours of morning, they are sleeping on the futon, half dressed, limbs tangled, when they are woken by a phone call. It's Nat, and her voice is the calm of consummate professional in a great emergency. She says 'Clint is gone.'


	12. The Innocent Are Accused

When the team tries to get back to the warehouse, they find it surrounded by yellow tape, policemen all over the place. They get a glimpse at the inside: the walls are covered in swastikas and snakes as well as slurs and slogans too foul to be reproduced here. Before a young police officer shoos them away, she blurts out that the site is assumed to be the local headquarters of Hydra, and the first step forward in the investigation. They found the place because of an anonymous tip. As all their graffiti supplies had been in the sealed building, the team seeks out Fury, who tells them the news – Phil has been arrested and charged with participating in, or possibly leading, Hydra work. The warehouse was rented under his name, and evidence was planted in it, so the suspicion seems reasonable. In order to protect the team, Phil said nothing, and will say nothing. Steve suggests going to the police and trying to explain, but the others refuse – they have been framed too efficiently for that. The first thing to do now is to find Clint. Nat is terribly worried about him, and Thor thinks it may be his last chance at finding Loki.

Nat is the one who manages to find Clint, up on Williamsburg Bridge. He is distraught, shaking. Disjointedly, he explains that Loki found him, made him reveal the location of the warehouse, got his lackeys to deface it. Just for the hell of it, he made Clint paint a few of the slurs himself. Then called the police. He intended to lock Clint inside so he would be found by the police, be jailed and possibly bring the others down, but Clint managed to escape through a hole in the roof. Nat congratulates Clint for escaping, but he isn't comforted – he cooperated with Hydra, and that's terrible. He wants to quit the team, and leave, but Nat is having none of it. She tells him it was the right thing to do, Loki had a gun to his head and it's ok that he did whatever he did to survive. He nods, but says he still was a coward – Loki made him talk about the team, and he talked – he said things he didn't want Loki to know, things he shouldn't have said at all. Clint says he knows he is useless, and tries to run away.

Nat forcibly grabs his wrist and twists it painfully to stop him leaving. She tells him that both the team and she need him to be around. She tells Clint that the first time they met, Clint did save Nat's life. Not by getting her out of where she was surrounded by the cops, she could have escaped that. But Clint cared whether she lived or died, and at the time, nobody did that, not even Nat herself. If it hadn't been for him, she would have self-destructed. Clint hugs Nat, she holds him, they are going to be fine. Pulling apart, Clint adds, as if he only remembered: they weren't after us just to root out the competition. I think Loki wants to bring down the Marvel Institute.


	13. Kind of a Plan

Despite Phil's arrest, Hydra keeps functioning in the next few days. The police can't act, the Hydra are so fast, and apparently so random, that there is no way to find them. Many members of the Marvel Institute are attacked, their homes and children are threatened if the Institute doesn't stop functioning. Marvel is the symbol of the togetherness and tolerance of the district, and many residents need the help from their financial and educational section desperately. But if the threats get worse, the institute will have to cease operations. The streets surrounding the building are covered in swastikas, and there is an enormous, three-story high attacking snake on Marvel institute itself. Nobody knows what Hydra will do, or when – the police cannot offer adequate protection, and only advises residents to avoid provocative behaviour. (The problem is, Hydra doesn't attack based on behaviour – apart from Marvel personnel, they attack immigrants as well as interracial and gay couples.)

The team wants to do something, they want to help, so they go to talk to Fury. Fury tells them to stop being idiots, there is nothing they could do short of luring Hydra into an open confrontation, they are just children and getting busted would just make Phil's situation worse. Phil went to jail to protect them, what more do they want?

The team regroups in Tony's house, and they decide to do just that: lure Hydra into open confrontation. They know that the reason the police can't find Hydra is their unpredictability, their utter lack of routine. But if the SHIELD street artists challenge them, if they do something that will force Hydra to come out in full force, that will allow the police to catch them, and also it will allow Thor to find Loki. Steve says he has an idea and starts sketching in his notebook. The Marvel Institute's building is Hydra's ultimate target, so it is likely that they keep permanent watch on it, at least on of them there to take note of the comings and goings of employees. So if the team were to go there and paint something enormous on the wall, Hydra would come out to stop them. Steve asks the rest of them if they can help – he needs Tony to weld new stencils, Bruce to mix fresh paint in at least five new colours, he needs Nat and Clint to figure out a way to paint a five-story-high mural without proper scaffolding. They all promise to do their best, and Tony grudgingly acknowledges that he understands why Steve's nickname used to be Captain.


	14. The Avengers go to Battle

The team go to Marvel institute at night, there is a slight drizzle of icy rain. Clint and Nat rig up a makeshift scaffolding with some planks and lots of ropes tied to the fire escape, that will allow the others to approach the wall, and they start painting five story high, in the hope that the Hydra members left to keep watch will interpret it as an attack on their territory, a challenge to their authority. Unfortunately, there are five Hydras left behind to keep watch, and they try to handle it without calling for backup. They start shooting at the people painting the wall, and Steve is almost hit. He loses his balance, and falls, only to be caught by the strong arms of Nat, who is holding him up effortlessly. Once he clambers back and stands on his own feet, it's clear that the project will be a failure: they will have to run away, and don't confront Hydra after all.

This is the moment when Tony runs back down the fire escape, hops onto his bike, hollers a few choice obscenities at the Hydra thugs, then drives into the night. The Hydra guys follow him. The rest of them work on finishing their project at record speed for twenty minutes until Tony arrives back – behind him, apparently the entire New York division of Hydra on motorbikes, and chasing them, a sizeable portion of the NYPD. Tony is close to the foot of the fire escape, where he could get up to the others, and to relative safety, when someone fires a shot. (It's dark, hard to tell who it was exactly.) Tony falls off the bike, the bike roars on and crashes against the wall.

Before the others can stop him, or even react, Bruce slides down a rope, and runs into the circle of Hydra surrounding Tony, who is lying on the ground. Bruce feels the rage coming on, he kicks and punches and bites his opponents, most of whom are actually armed, but they cower in front of his screaming, deranged onslaught. Bruce slings the unconscious Tony on his shoulder, and carries him up on the fire escape, pulling up the ladder to the ground behind them. The others are worried: Tony doesn't move, and Bruce looks feral in his tattered shirt, smeared with dirt and blood, baring his teeth in a snarl, and everyone remembers what happened the last time he lost control. But when he crouches over Tony to check his vital signs, his hands are impossibly gentle, and he is more surprised than any of them at how harmless he is to his friends. A quick check reveals that the bullet broke Tony's arm, and the fall may or may not have given him a concussion, but he isn't in immediate danger. Tony slowly comes back to consciousness while Bruce uses his own shirt to tie up the wound on his forearm, and he smiles a weak, wincing smile in surprise over both of them being still alive.

In the street, a huge brawl has begun: the first open confrontation between the police and the Hydra militia. Sooner or later, more people will stop fighting for long enough to notice them working away on the wall, and the sensible thing to do would be to leave immediately. But Steve wants to finish the project, Thor wants to wait until Loki shows up, Clint wants to redeem himself, and Nat doesn't seem to have a problem with getting involved in the in the confrontation. A few more minutes of panicked work and they are finished, Clint and Nat take down the collapsible scaffolding, taking care to drop it on some of the brawlers underneath them. They know that going down the fire escape would put them in the middle of the fight, so they go up, Tony leaning heavily on Bruce, the rest of them carrying the equipment. The rain becomes a vicious downpour, reducing visibility and covering their escape. Once they are on the flat roof of the Marvel Institute, they quickly find the door that will allow them to get into the central staircase, and then escape through one of the ground floor doors or windows. It's locked, but Nat is good with opening stuff, and it takes her half a minute to pick the lock. They are ready to file down through the staircase, tired but triumphant at having gotten away with it. This is when Loki shows up, alone, with a gun.


	15. Lightning Strikes

Loki shows up, alone, with a gun. Like them, he is utterly drenched with rain, his long dark hair plastered to his face. He grins at them, raises the handgun, and they know that he has fallen apart so much that he could actually shoot. He enjoys his power over them, and points the gun at each of them in turn, taunting them with the things he learned from Clint: he laughs at Steve's old hand-me-down clothes, Tony's pathetic attempts at self-destruction, Bruce's little episodes, Nat's accent fading in and out, he doesn't have to say anything to Clint, because Clint is the one who gave all the others up to him. Who are they to think they can stop Loki, who are they to think they can stand up to the might of Hydra? The team stands together, not moving, all of them more afraid for each other than for themselves.

Thor calls him by his name, tries to reason with him, but Loki shouts at him to shut up. He starts talking to Thor, ignoring all the others. 'First of all, my name is Daniel Laufey. Secondly, you will not get to win this time. You were always better than me, you have always won, but not anymore. You won't outdo me this time, because now I know my true nature. Of course I was second to you, of course I could never please father while I foolishly pretended I was someone else. But now I'm with Hydra, and I'm not weak anymore. I take orders directly from the central command, and I have power over the life and death of hundreds. Of course, I find their stupid racial ideology annoying at best, and their choice of victims could be wider, but if they do disgusting things, so much better. This lets me be the monster I've always been.'

Thor moves closer to try and block Loki's line of sight, to protect the others from him. Instead of reacting aggressively, Loki takes a few steps back, putting him on the edge of the roof – and Thor realises that while Loki may shoot, he is just as likely to throw himself off the building. Thor freezes, cautiously says 'Brother?' But Loki answers with a snarl 'I'm not your brother! Can't you see that I'm nothing like you, that I'd never want to be anything like you?'

Steve has been watching from a few steps back, rain and adrenaline blurring his vision, and he knows he should stay quiet, but when he remembers the shaved heads of all Hydra members, he can't help but blurt out, against his better judgement 'So why didn't you cut your hair?' Lightning flashes, illuminating a strange, unreadable expression on Loki's face. Then thunder rolls, and Loki collapses forward, the gun slipping out of his numb fingers, and he lets Thor hold him as he shakes with sobs, lets Thor pat his shoulder and murmur something hardly audible about a bridge and a rainbow.

The others, though dumbfounded, don't comment on this development, other than Nat snatching up the gun and tucking it into her waistband. The sound of police sirens cuts through the rain, and they know that they have to get out of there, Loki included. So they run down the staircase, even though Tony seems close to fainting and Loki stumbles like a sleepwalker. Once they get to the ground floor, Clint (who has the layout in his head) leads them to a backdoor, which Nat easily opens. They are out on the street, but they can still hear the sirens, they know the police are closing in, and with Tony's motor busted, they have no means of getting away. At least not until a little blue Honda tears down the street, brakes in front of them, and Maria Hill sticks her head out the window, hissing 'get in already'. Once they have all piled into the car and drove away with great haste, Steve gets around to thanking her. She grins at him in the rear-view mirror, saying 'Nick knew what you were going to do'.

There is silence in the car as Maria Hill drives them home. Everybody is dripping rainwater on the seats, Tony is dripping blood too. Bruce rides shotgun, with Tony held still in his lap, Steve in the backseat tries to sit as far away as possible from Loki, who is still quietly sniffling into Thor's shoulder, Nat and Clint are curled up in the trunk, bracing themselves and each other against the impact.

Dawn breaks over the Marvel Building, and over the remains of an enormous fight. With the sun lighting the façade, the SHIELD team's five-story-high graffiti becomes clearly visible: it is the Statue of Liberty, holding the graffiti of the Hydra snake back with her upheld torch, her face alive with rightful defiant anger. A speech bubble above her reads, in capital letters six feet tall: 'If I can't save my people, I'll sure as hell avenge them.'


	16. Our Heroes Go Viral

The next day both local media and local gossip is entirely focused on the mass arrest of Hydra members, and the entire district feels relieved. Almost all members of the New York branch were arrested, and eventually charged with vandalism, battery, theft, and hate crime. Interviews with the real culprits soon reveal Phil to be innocent, and he is quietly released.

However, public interest is also focused on the enormous image of the Statue of Liberty, and the mysterious street artists who helped defeat Hydra. A grainy cell-phone photograph that shows the six of them on the fire escape soon goes viral, and half of New York is trying to guess the identity of the team, dubbed "Avengers" after their slogan. The police are still uncertain whether or not they should start investigating them in particular, but as a way of preventing something like Hydra's almost-takeover happening again, there is a huge crackdown on graffiti: it's almost certain the group can't keep doing street art.

Moreover, Nick Fury feels that it isn't a good idea for any of them to remain in New York, just in case the police figures it out, or if Hydra reinforcements show up looking for them. He tells the children to lay low, and get out of the city if possible. Phil says goodbye, and flies to Portland to stay with his cellist for a while. Nick himself teaches Steve and Tony in school, and taught evening classes in Marvel Institute attended by Nat and Clint, so he may be in trouble too. Maria Hill is the only one with no traceable connection to the project, so she takes over both his teaching job, and the recruitment of a new team for Project SHIELD. Nick himself makes a few phone calls and takes the first bus for Westchester. An old friend runs a quite special school there, and they need a new art teacher, because the last one kept bringing knives to lessons.


	17. Assembling for Shawarma

One week after the events at Marvel Institute, the team meets for shawarma.

Steve tells the others his mom has a new job back in Liberty, Kentucky. (He does not know that the job has something to do with Nick Fury calling in a few favours.) Steve is glad to do the last year of high school at home, and he has hundreds of plans already. For example, he will ask Peggy if he can draw her. He thinks she will let him, but she has been very busy this past year, preparing for her entry into law school, so maybe he'll have to draw her while studying in the school library, mid-afternoon light in her hair as she bends over her books. He is overjoyed to see his old friends again, but he knows he will miss the new ones he made. Tony vehemently tried to convince him to 'come study art or something' on the east coast one year later, when he's done with school. Steve is not sure, but he considers it, especially since Tony also offered to help figure out scholarships.

Tony himself has been accepted to MIT one year early –after all he _is _a genius, and he doesn't feel like holding himself back anymore. Tony and Bruce sit close to each other, knees and shoulders touching, and both of them seem more grounded, simply happier than they have been for a long while. Bruce is less afraid of hurting people, now that for once in his life, he managed to use his rage for good. He decided to go back to Med School, because he did want to learn medicine to help people, before the rest of it got in the way, and he plans on staying in Cambridge with Tony. He even started painting again: the cast on Tony's broken arm is covered in lines of green permanent marker, the pattern a little bit like circuitry and a little bit like a love poem.

Thor tells the team he took Loki home to their parents, but spares them the details of the tearful reunion. At first Loki didn't want to avoid prison, feeling he deserved it. However, it turned out that Loki knew the real names and locations of half of Hydra high command, and considering his involvement in Hydra lead to no deaths, and only impermanent injuries, the police was willing to offer him a deal. Loki gave him the names, and he is going to testify: this means that many high-ranking Neo-Nazis will be caught, but also that he himself will be in lethal danger, meaning that the entire family will need to go into witness protection. They will have to move away to an undisclosed location, change their name, even cut their hair. They will go on with their lives, and Loki will go to therapy if Thor has to drag him there. Thor can never see the team again, and he can never see Jane either, but he is still glad that he found his brother again.

Nat and Clint decide to leave New York too. They have heard of an interesting, innovative graffiti crew overseas, calling themselves Ger's Pigheads, and they are set on joining. They can't afford a plane ticket, so they'll get employment on a cruise ship bound for Europe, and hitchhike from then on. They don't need to hurry, the crew is still going to be there whenever they get to Budapest.

Everyone in the team knows that they have to part, but they all feel that these few months formed a connection between them. They know that they will remember one another forever, and that if one of them were in trouble, all of the others would be ready to help. But how to stay in contact, when they are taking such different roads, when Steve won't have his own computer, Nat and Clint won' t have money for cell phones, and Thor won't even have his own name? They should tag, of course. They should make street art that is so large and grandiose that it catches public attention and gets into the news all over the world, alerting all six of them that they are needed. But how would they know that it was one of them who made it, not someone else? It should be one word they all agree on, something simple, something short, something memorable and meme-able: the word ASSEMBLE.


End file.
